Beauty and the UnBeautiful

Life is messy. It gets ugly. Really ugly. And it’s so easy to get caught up in all that ugliness and completely forget to look for the beauty. When you’re up to your elbows in poop and spit-up, you haven’t had a chance to shower all day, and you still have 3 hours until somebody can relieve you? That’s ugly. But that baby – the cause of all your problems right now – smiles at you for the first time, and all of your problems disappear. How beautiful is that? You, for whatever reason, have to give up your house – the one that you have poured hour upon hour into making into a home? There’s nothing beautiful about that, is there? Oh, but there is! It’s not the house that was your home. It’s the people you share it with. The laughter, the smiles, the tears – all the things you shared in that house are the things that turned that house into your home. Your home, wherever it may be, is beautiful because of the love that lives there. Your preschooler just thoroughly embarrassed you at the park in the middle of his t-ball game, which is actually a pretty common occurrence, but you know that he’s going to come up with another awesome way to hug you when you get home. Jump hugs, double jump hugs, spin hugs, squeeze-tight hugs. Can you think of anything more beautiful?

Cancer, though. Cancer is ugly. There’s absolutely nothing about cancer that I can think of as beautiful. It literally sucks the life out of you. I’m sure I could come up with some pretty unsavory words for cancer, but what’s the point? As ugly as cancer is, though, I can still find beauty in this crappy situation I’m in. In these last two months, I have opened up to people. I’ve made new friends. I’ve experienced kindness from total strangers. I’ve learned that it’s OK to ask for and accept help from others. I have experienced love like never before. The day we found out that the diagnosis was probably cancer, I climbed up in the hospital bed with my husband, put my head on his shoulder, and cried. We said things that have needed to be said for a long time. We forgave each other. We fell in love again. It was beautiful. Caring is beautiful. Kindness is beautiful. Love is beautiful.

If, by some miracle, he pulls through this, it will be beautiful. We will have a messy, loud, chaotic, beautiful life. If he doesn’t pull through this… I can’t even begin to imagine the beauty he will experience! So, no matter what happens in this crazy, messed-up life, I’m going to keep looking for the beauty, and I’m going to keep on keepin’ on until I get to experience that ultimate beauty for myself!

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” -Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV